InfoPath Dev

I'm trying have INFOPATH automatically fax a form and pull the fax number from a data field. That way you don't have to go through the MS fax wizard, which kills any kind of automation.

I know that this can be done since I keep hearing rumors. Anyone have a source on this?

This is the holy grail of medical records and no software out there seems to be able to do it.



Larry Kropp M.D.

Hi Dr. Kropp and welcome to the board! It should be possible to do this using code, but I doubt there's some easy quick magic that will do it. If there was, we would have probably heard about it by now. Anyway, we can investigate writing a tool for this over the upcoming weekend. I'll put it on my list of research projects. Thanks for the great tip. We'll get Excalibur out and slay the dragons. :)

Patrick Halstead [InfoPath MVP]
InfoPathDev

Has there been any solution made for this yet?  I would like to do the same thing! 

I haven't looked into direct faxing from Infopath but I do have an idea for a possible workaround. My friends use an online automated faxing company where they e-mail the content to a server which then faxes it to the phone number in the subject field. This should be relatively easy for you to set up as a submit action.

 Could you give me the details on that.  And is that faxing an Infopath View?

Hi Michael,

E-fax provides an SDK that you can programmatically invoke to send faxes. Of course, that requires a fax account with them and some code to call their APIs. We never created the "tool" that I suggested we would "over the weekend" .

However, we would be very happy to help you create a fax solution for your InfoPath form, and help you sell it to the InfoPath masses. Please e-mail me separately if you are interested.

Cheers!

I now have a separate application that does the faxing. My one last hurdle is the print to pdf.  I know in JScript you can do XDocument.PrintOut() and this uses your default printer, but I dont want to have my print to pdf as my default printer.  So is there a way in Jscript to specify the printer you want to use, and then specify where it will save the pdf file at.  Thank you for all your help.

All I can find about client-side printer selection in Javascrpt is that it isn't possible. Doesn't your fax provider accept other attachment types? eFax says it accepts over 30 file formats - there may be one that accepts an MHT or some other standard infopath output. I haven't had a chance to look into it further I'm afraid. You can use functions in an e-mail submit to build e-mail addresses from fields in the form ([email protected]) and attach the document to be faxed... or am I missing something and it's a lot more complicated?

 You don't have to set your default printer to PDF - you can just set it so the form itself prints to PDF by default. If you go into View Properties from the Views task pane and click on "Page Setup", you'll see the Printer name option.